



2 thoughts on “Intentions

  1. I thought your question regarding who’s responsible for the detonation of the atomic bomb was a solid way to convey the necessity of recognizing intention. In my opinion, we must not only recognize the person’s intention, but also analyze the entire scenario holistically and then incorporate intention. For instance, the man who created the atomic bomb, although the mastermind behind the weapon, is not directly responsible for its detonation because he was simply just developing something, which was his intention. The man theorized the concept is still not directly responsible, although still more so than the previous man. Again, his intention was probably not for the bomb to be used in such a way, but more just the acknowledgment that it can be. The man who “pulled the trigger” is the most directly responsible in the detonation because his intention here is quite clear, there is not much room for doubt about what he was trying to do (unless there’s a very special circumstance in which it is clear that it was an accident, but I think that would be quite rare).

    1. What is eye opening to me (and what you touched upon in this post) is that if eliminative materialism is true, eventually all folk psychology will be eliminated. Thinking of something like this is hard to fathom. How can an 8 year child know everything about a brain? I will provide an example: a child who is raised bilingual never thinks anything of the two languages he or she speaks. Simply, he or she was taught from birth the two different languages. But, as an adult, it is much harder to learn a language if a person has not been exposed to said language. If we apply this to eliminative materialism, it is easier to see that a child will be able to know specific things if he or she is just simply taught the ideas growing up.

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